University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2018 Papal Plots and Muslim Mischief: Religious Fear and Democratic Sensibilities in Early America J. Logan Tomlin University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Tomlin, J. Logan, "Papal Plots and Muslim Mischief: Religious Fear and Democratic Sensibilities in Early America. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2018. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4988 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by J. Logan Tomlin entitled "Papal Plots and Muslim Mischief: Religious Fear and Democratic Sensibilities in Early America." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Christopher P. Magra, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Kristen J. Block, Mark D. Hulsether, Carl T. Olsson Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Papal Plots and Muslim Mischief: Religious Fear and Democratic Sensibilities in Early America A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville J. Logan Tomlin May 2018 !ii Abstract The consensus among early American historians is that anti-Catholicism served as an important source of pan-Protestant British nationalism after the Glorious Revolution. Different Protestant denominations from around the British empire drew unity from their shared fear and loathing of Catholics. My dissertation presents surprising evidence that anti-Catholic rhetoric was not always about Catholicism itself. I argue that nascent democratic sensibilities were rooted in Reformed theological anxieties about the preservation of liberty of conscience. Liberty of conscience was a contested notion that promoted heartfelt, personal piety as the right way to worship God and that stressed the fact that a certain degree of autonomy was necessary to express this authentic devotion. Religious fears about threats to that autonomy pre-dated the Glorious Revolution. What is more, these fears divided protestant Anglo-Americans as much as they brought them together. Fear regarding the loss of religious autonomy drove contests between a variety of Protestant groups for political, economic, and social power. In the process, this fear guided a concept of ever more generous political and religious autonomy upheld by the language of anti-Catholicism. Scholars situate the connection between Protestantism and democracy in the Early Republic, and they maintain this link was the result of the American Revolution and the Great Awakening. My research proves this link existed long before either. My dissertation also suggests a foundational paradox in American life: religious xenophobia and popular anxieties about the loss of freedom of conscience proved to be effective tools in inculcating democratic sensibilities in America. !iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Religious Anxieties and Xenophobia in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland….…………..16 Chapter 2: Xenophobia Beyond Albion’s Shores…………………………………….…….……41 Chapter 3: “As Arbitrary as the Grand Turk:” Freedom of Conscience and the Protestant Image of Islam..……………………………………67 Chapter 4: “Democratical and Anti-Papist:” Freedom of Conscience and the Struggle over Religious Taxes in Massachusetts…………………………………………………………………………………93 Chapter 5: “A Contest of Papists and Levellers:” Freedom of Conscience and the Struggle for Political Supremacy in Pennsylvania…………………………………………………………………………………125 Chapter 6: “No Popery, No Tyranny:” Bishops and American Democracy……..……………..158 Conclusion…..………………………………………………………………………………… 191 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………199 Vita….…………………………………………………………………………………………..222 !1 Introduction The Methodist minister Phillip Embury described obstacles facing Methodists in North America in 1757. He singled out Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as the most difficult places for Methodists to reside in. “New England, as is widely known, strangles dissent,” he explained, as Puritan religious and political leaders forced “numbers of Christians not of their persuasion to leave their colony under great burden … or to convert themselves to the Associated [Congregationalist] Churches.”1 Pennsylvania was just as inhospitable. Embury wrote that Pennsylvania’s ruling Quaker sect “controls most of the wealth” of the colony, and disadvantaged non-Quakers in economic dealings as “they occupy most positions of authority within the towns.”2 And Quakers seemed intent on “forcing the withdrawal of all other [sects] from public life.” This left other Protestants with little recourse to “protect their interests and privileges” in worshiping God as their conscience dictated.3 The result, according to Embury, was not without irony. “Although it is said there are very few Papists in America … the spirit of jealousy displayed by some ruling Christians towards their many suffering brethren may suggest, to the impartial observer, that they are behind every rock and tree, … occupying positions of substance and considerable authority.”4 Embury considered Puritans and Quakers to be Papists, 1 Samuel J. Fanning, “Phillip Embury: Founder of Methodism in New York,” in Methodist History, Vol. 3 (January, 1965), 16-19. 2 Ibid., 24-25. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 Ibid., 25; Portions of Embury’s account are also found in William Warrant Sweet. Men of Zeal: The Romance of American Methodist Beginnings. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1935), 53-63; Willam A. Powell, Jr., Methodist Circuit-Riders in America, 1766-1844. (Masters Thesis, University of Richmond, 1977), 2-6. !2 as they threatened individual heartfelt piety, or liberty of conscience. And he was not alone in feeling this way. There is a consensus among historians who have examined religion in the early modern British Atlantic world that Anglo-Americans united behind a pan-Protestant front. These religious historians insist that Britons on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean united in opposition to the Catholic Church. Protestant Britons shared a view of Catholicism defined as a force of aggressive intolerance and repression that was determined to undermine British freedoms and prosperity. This was rooted in the repression of Protestants by the Catholic church, but also the many controversies and conflicts within Briton that were blamed on Catholics. Protestants fought one another prior to the Glorious Revolution, but in its wake the British Empire was defined as a Protestant bastion holding back the spread of Catholicism. These religious historians further see within eighteenth century British America a fractured religious environment of ever-increasing denominational variety whose one shared sense of self relied more and more on an understanding of Protestantism defined by intense pluralism and diversity. Their British identity drew disparate theological and doctrinal strands into a single communal fabric defined by religious dissent and oriented outward as a countervailing force to Catholic universalism and a world inhabited by !3 many non-Christians of whom they were increasingly aware.5 In short, religious historians believe anti-Catholic rhetoric and sentiment brought different Protestant denominations together around the Atlantic World after the Glorious Revolution. Religious historians have traditionally argued that anti-Catholicism served as an important source of this pan-Protestant unity that swept early America after the Glorious Revolution. The degree to which Britons around the Atlantic World united behind a Protestant, anti-Catholic banner has been overdrawn. Britain had a tumultuous past of internal conflict and political upheaval that pre-dated the Glorious Revolution, and that owed much to that same Catholic-Protestant dualism. Political conspiracy, civil war, the overthrow of monarchies, and repressive political and ecclesiastical policies were all commonly tied to internal threats deemed 5 Carla Gardina Pestana. A Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Thomas S. Kidd. The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Patricia Bonomi. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Brendan McConville. The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Owen Stanwood. The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Melinda Zook. Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England. (New York: University Park Publishing, 1999), 201; John Pollock. The Popish Plot: A Study in the History of the Reign of Charles II. (London: